| Saturday,
April 8, 2000 I suppose to had to happen. Small computers
are wired up to a frustration meter. This morning I get a particularly
annoying spam. I want to report it. And of course I cannot reach spamcop.
Are they down? Server overloaded? Gone fishing? Who knows. Cannot
reach... And the annoyance index climbs. I should know better. The
Internet is no longer a vast experiment to determine how many grown people
can be got to watch a screen on which nothing interesting is happening,
but it still has some of those characteristics.
Well, at least Spamcop is back. I am still not sure that reporting spam
doesn't get me more spam.
There have been several more exchanges of letters in
the evolution debates, and I have added a few paragraphs. Absent
something new on the subject, I think this one is ended. I do believe
there has been a good exchange of views.
There is a good summary of the godfrey/demon
case in mail.
And I am pleased to announce
that SF author and long time friend and space scientist Yoji Kondo has a new
home in the sky:
A New Asteroid Name
An asteroid has been named for Yoji Kondo in
recognition of his
contributions to astronomy and the space program.
The asteroid
is:
Asteroid 8072 = Yojikondo (1981 G01)
Its visual magnitude on a perihelic opposition would
be 16.6
magnitude and on aphelic opposition 18. 4. Assuming
that the
value of its albedo is about average, its size is
estimated from
its brightness to be about 4 km across. The sidereal
period of
its orbit is 3.68 years, and its orbital semi-major
axis is
2.3854696 Astronomical Units with an eccentricity of
0.1459289.
[It is not an Earth-crossing object.]
The report was published in the MPC (Minor Planet
Circular) dated
2000 March 20.
Orbital Elements of Asteroid 8072 (= Yojikondo) are:
Epoch 2000 February 26.0 TT = JDT 2451600.5
orbital semi-major axis = 2.3854696 Astronomical Units
orbital eccentricity = 0.1459289
orbital period = 3.68 sidereal years
orbital inclination = 2.57094 degrees
mean anomaly in degrees from perihelion = 50.6813 degrees
mean angular motion = 0.26751198 degrees per day
omega (angle from the node to the perihelion) = 163.28752 degrees
node (angle from vernal equinox to the ascending node) = 12.24599
degrees
Dana Blankenhorn says, concerning
the Godfrey/Demon ISP case:
But the technical point, as you know, goes deeper
than that. You can't just "take something down" from Usenet.
Once it gets there, it's mirrored in many, many different places. You
erase it, it comes back the next time you load to Usenet. So you erase it
again? And again? And are you liable each time someone sees it before
erasure?
Placing any restrictions, based on any law, on the
exchange of ideas within Usenet presents a daunting technical challenge I
don't think Usenet as presently constituted can possibly meet. But you
probably know more about the technical ins-and-outs of that than I do...
Actually, I don't; I'm not all that familiar with USENET,, so I don't
know how easy or difficult it would be to chop out, say, The Protocols of
the Learned Elders of Zion, or a tract on ritual murder of Jews by United
Methodists, if someone put that material up; I certainly would not want to
be one of the owners of an ISP that published this stuff as factual. I do
know that Scientology seems to have been able to suppress some materials
about their system, with far less justification, but I confess I haven't
been following how they do it.
Freedom of the Press means freedom from prior restraint; it is not
absolution in advance for libel, and in a libel the author and the
publisher are both tort-feasors, or so I understand; libel law isn't a
subject I have more than a jack-leg knowledge of. I do have some claim to
understanding the Constitution both as intended by the Signers, and as
interpreted by the courts. Whether an ISP having been made aware of a
libel is now a publisher within the reach of the libel law I don't know. I
do know there is a principle that there should be no wrong without some
remedy, and surely if I publish that someone ritually murders children and
eats them, the person so named ought to have some remedy?
Assuming you haven't seen it already, you might get a chuckle out of
the cartoon, available at http://www.non-sequitur.net/
(if you don't get to it today, Saturday April 8, find the one dated March
25, 2000). Have a laugh -- I sure did.
--
Walter Giesbrecht walterg@yorku.ca
Data Librarian "Librarians are the secret masters of the world.
They control information. Don't ever piss one off." -- Spider
Robinson
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